Jeanne D'Arc: her life and death eBook

and there was one with a hope that perpetual imprisonment,
bread of sorrow and water of anguish, might be substituted
for that terrible death. Finally, it was decided
that—­always on the side of mercy, as every
act proved—­the tribunal should once more
“charitably admonish” the prisoner for
the salvation of her soul and body, and that after
all this “good deliberation and wholesome counsel”
the case should be concluded.

Again there follows a pause of four days. No
doubt the Bishop and his assessors had other things
to do, their ecclesiastical functions, their private
business, which could not always be put aside because
one forsaken soul was held in suspense day after day.
Finally on the 24th of May, Jeanne again received
in her prison a dignified company, some quite new
and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the reader’s
mind that it was perhaps to show off the interesting
prisoner to two new and powerful bishops, the first,
Louis of Luxembourg, a relative of her first captor,
that this last examination was held), nine men in all,
crowding her chamber—­exponuntur Johannae
defectus sui, says the record—­to expound
to Jeanne her faults. It was Magister Peter Morice
to whom this office was confided. Once more the
“schedule” was gone over, and an address
delivered laden with all the bad words of the University.
“Jeanne, dearest friend,” said the orator
at last, “it is now time, at the end of the
trial, to think well what words these are.”
She would seem to have spoken during this address,
at least once—­to say that she held to everything
she had said during the trial. When Morice had
finished she was once more questioned personally.

She was asked if she still thought and believed that
it was not her duty to submit her deeds and words
to the Church militant, or to any other except God,
upon which she replied, “What I have always said
and held to during the trial, I maintain to this moment”;
and added that if she were in judgment and saw the
fire lighted, the faggots burning, and the executioner
ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the
fire, she could say nothing else, but would sustain
what she had said in her trial, to death.

Once more the scribe has written on his margin the
words Responsio Johannae superba—­the
proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her
expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation
about her, must have moved the man, thus for the third
time to send down to us his distinctly human impression
of the worn out prisoner before her judges. “And
immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more,
the cause was concluded,” says the record, so
formal, sustained within such purely abstract limits,
yet here and there with a sort of throb and reverberation
of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the
Inquisitor too all words seemed to have been taken.
It is as when amid the excited crowd in the Temple
the officers of the Pharisees approaching to lay hands
on a greater than Jeanne, fell back, not knowing why,
and could not do their office. This man was silenced
also. Two bishops were present, and one a great
man full of patronage; but not for the richest living
in Normandy could Peter Morice find any more to say.